'Naipaul's rants self-promotion'

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, SEPT. 1. It is turning out to be quite a season for literary spats and V.S. Naipaul who started it all with a savage attack on some of the world's best names in literature, including E.M.Forster, James Joyce, Wole Soyinka and R.K.Narayan, has now been served a stinging blow by Paul Theroux, his one-time protege and friend who has been stalking him since they mysteriously fell out after Sir Vidia's marriage to Nadira.

Theroux, whose ``Sir Vidia's Shadow'' remains the most authoritative ``insider's'' account of Naipaul's personality, has lashed out at him again dismissing his new novel ``Half a Life'' as the ``slightest book Naipaul has ever written and unquestionably the weirdest.'' Writing in The Guardian today, he calls it ``laboured and joyless'' and says without Naipaul's name on it, the novel would have been ``turned down in a flash''. ``With his name on it, of course, its trajectory is certain: great reviews, poor sales, and a literary prize,'' he says, alluding to the fact that it figures prominently in this year's Booker Prize longlist.

He terms Naipaul's tirade against Forster and Narayan, etc., in a London magazine on the eve of the launch of ``Half a Life'' as a ``familiar'' publicity stunt. ``We who know Naipaul understand that gratuitous outbursts such as this nearly always precedes the appearance of a Naipaul work.

In spirit, it is like a boxer's frenzy of boasting and threats before an important match: in part a species of self-promotion in the form of chest- thumping and shouted abuse, in part a suggestion of tactics,'' he says comparing the ``rant'' to ``explosive abuse you get from someone whose Valium has worn off.''

Naipaul in an interview to Literary Review a few weeks ago accused Narayan and other Indian writers of lacking a ``sense of history'' and dismissed Forster's ``Passage to India'' as ``utter rubbish'' and Joyce as ``unreadable''. More recently, he shrugged off Salman Rushdie's latest novel ``Fury'' saying he was not interested in reading it.

Theroux says there is a pattern in Naipaul's attack - in almost every case the writers he attacks have been associated with him by critics under labels like ``colonial'', ``Indian'', ``Commonwealth or ``exiled''.

The outburst, he says, has two motives. First is to declare that ``I am incomparable'', and second to ``demonstrate how his novel is superior to the specific writers and books he attacks.'' Forster, Maugham and Narayan are not ``random targets'' of Naipaul's wrath, but chosen specifically in the context of ``Half a Life'' which has an echo of all of the three novelists, Theroux argues.

``The novel is Forsterian in its Indian setting and characters; Narayanesque in being south Indian and small-town; Maugham makes an appearance in it. Joyce figures in Naipaul's rant because he was a novelist preoccupied with new ways of telling a story,'' he says.

Theroux recalls that Naipaul similarly raged against West Indian writers when he was writing novels set in the West Indies; against Indian writers when he wrote ``An Area of Darkness''; and against African novelists when he wrote ``A Bend in the River'', set in Africa.

``You cannot beat books out on the drum,'' he famously taunted African writers. Theroux's is the latest in a series of literary bouts that in recent weeks have seen Naipaul, Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge and a number of lesser figures put on their gloves - and with the Booker season upon us this might not be the knockout punch yet.

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